Editor’s Note: This is the fourth entry in our theme for the month of May: Cities of the Eastern Mediterranean

by Molly Oringer

“The rabbis prayed here, in Saïda’s synagogue,” recalled Basma, a Palestinian woman in her mid-thirties. It was early 2020, and we stood gathering in a courtyard typical of the medieval neighborhood, Ḥarat al-Yahūd (The Jewish Quarter), an area within the city of Saïda (Sidon) in southern Lebanon. Basma gestured toward a nearby alleyway while telling us (Janan, my friend and research assistant; Ahmed, a Palestinian cafe owner and our neighborhood guide; and myself, a Jewish-American anthropologist) about the 2012 visit of two ultra–Orthodox rabbis who had come from the United States on a solidarity trip. Believed to be one of the world’s oldest, Saïda’s now-derelict synagogue was once that of a lively Jewish community with ancient social, religious, and mercantile networks that spanned beyond today’s borders that carve up and sequester the people of the Eastern Mediterranean. The last of Saïda’s Jews had left, like other non–Jewish Lebanese, for safety and success in the diaspora during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-90).^[1] Today the neighborhood is deemed undesirable by middle- and upper-class Saïdawis for its high level of poverty, lack of municipal services, and crumbling infrastructure. Yet it is also home to many Palestinian and Syrian refugees and migrant workers who made their homes in the abandoned properties of Saïda’s Jews, including the neighborhood’s ancient synagogue.

The rabbis, members of the Neturei Karta movement—a Haredi group known for their anti–Zionist views and activism in solidarity with Palestinians—had joined in on a procession marking Land Day, which commemorates the general strike held by Palestinians against Israel’s attempts to appropriate privately-owned Palestinian land in 1976.^[2] Basma added that it was the first time that organized Jewish prayers had been held since the neighborhood’s last Jewish residents had departed during Israel’s invasion of the city in 1982. Basma’s family hailed from Acre, just under 76 kilometers south on the shoreline of the Mediterranean. She had lived in the quarter all her life; without the property rights associated with Lebanese citizenship, her family’s choice of residence was severely limited.

The Lebanese Civil War left the country’s eighteen officially recognized ethnoreligious communities even more sequestered, both socially and spatially, than they were prior. I posit that, in the shadow of violence that killed and disappeared some 170,000 and displaced non-Jewish and Jewish Lebanese alike, the chasm left by the only community that virtually ceased to exist in the lead-up to, and in midst of, the Civil War provides a space for Lebanese to consider that there was once room for this community to flourish. Memories of Saïda’s Jews as narrated by the non-Jewish community present today gesture to a collective social recollection of a not-so-distant past in which communities across the Levant engaged in all the trappings of an interconnected economic and social life—a world made impossible by imperially-carved borders and exclusionary projects of ethnonationalism. In Lebanon, where an official end to the war has not led to either fact-finding reconciliation or a true end to protracted violence, a spotlight on Lebanon’s Jewish history may appear peculiar, given the fact that the number of Jews in Lebanon is thought to have peaked at around 14,000. These emergent discourses range from those employed by hegemonic powers like property developers involved in the revamping of Beirut’s Magen Avraham synagogue, but also more diffuse efforts undertaken by people like Basma, who help to weave the still-visible fragments of urban Jewish life into stories they tell.

Prior to the establishment of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe; disaster) in 1948, roughly 850,000 Jews composed various communities throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Levantine communities—particularly those in urban settings—were heterogeneous in nature and counted Ottoman and Sephardic Jews, as well as European Jewish traders, rabbis, and educators. In popular imagination, Lebanon has long been conceived as uniquely ethnically, religiously, and linguistically diverse. In varying ways for people across religious affiliations and citizenships, how the history of Jews in Lebanon is recalled today represents differing approaches to the Lebanese nation as a so-called nation of minorities in the Eastern Mediterranean. The ways in which this history is recalled, both in the material landscape of the city and by its current residents, are filtered through a range of personal experiences, political orientations, social networks, and experiences with navigating the built environments that were once home to Saïda’s Jews. As Yael Navaro writes in the context of Turkish-occupied Northern Cyprus, the ways that the past remains embedded in the built environment, despite the passing of time, cannot be understood as separate from how this history is imagined phantomically—through the perception of the neighborhood’s now-absent residents—by those who engage with its materiality.^[3] Despite their absence from Saïda today, the Jews who once called the city home exert a lingering presence through the spaces they left when migrating and by the ways they continue to interact with these spaces both monetarily and affectively by, for example, collecting small sums of rent on their properties or funding the clean-up of Saïda’s Jewish cemetery.

Though nearly all of my interlocutors in Saïda were quick to demonstrate their knowledge of Judaism and Jewishness as distinct from political Zionism, the historical presence of Jews in what would become the modern Lebanese state has been complicated by Israel’s ongoing, violent omnipresence. This is particularly true for the country’s Palestinian residents, whose expulsion from their ancestral home was carried out in the supposed name of Jewry worldwide and who continue to face discrimination by the highest echelons of the Lebanese state. Etched in the psyche of many are memories of Israel’s siege of Beirut in 1982; the fifteen-year military occupation of South Lebanon from 1985–2000; massacres committed by right-wing Christian militias with oversight from the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), as occurred at Sabra and Shatila (1982) and Qana (1996); Israel’s 2006 war against Hezbollah, which killed some 1,300 civilians in Lebanon and targeted the country’s infrastructure; and its ongoing incursions and bombings in the country’s south as an element of its genocidal campaign in Gaza and beyond. Those in Lebanon who personally remember their Jewish neighbors and friends from before the Lebanese Civil War recall members of a social fabric whose precarious cohesion was—like their own—a victim of Lebanon’s social and geographic position at the center of mass political violence.

Modern Saïda: A Short Urban History Through the Lens of the Jewish Community

Saïda is located on the Mediterranean coast some thirty-five kilometers to the south of the capital Beirut. The city of Saïda has, since time immemorial, featured prominently on the mental map of Jewish communities in the Holy Land. The ancient core of Saïda, at the western edge of the contemporary city, has been a site of settlement since antiquity and came to fruition in its current form at the end of the Crusader period (1095–1302).^[4] In the last century of the Ottoman Empire, Saïda—as well as Tripoli—were the primary ports of the Eastern Mediterranean. As recently as the French Mandate period, Saïda was conceived as an integral node on the region’s economic map: its location on the Haifa–Beirut–Tripoli railway placed Saïda within the social and physical network of cities in modern Palestine and Lebanon. Saïda’s role as a nexus of social, economic, and religious life was particularly important for the city’s Jews and Jewry in the region more broadly. A mix of residences and commercial establishments, the Old City today—referred to interchangeably in Lebanese Arabic as al-Balad (the town) or Saïda al-Qadimeh (old Saïda)—contains many historically important sites, the largest number of which date to the Ottoman era. The Old City remained fully enclosed within walls until the twentieth century, when access points were constructed along the sea road. Many of the religious centers in the Old City today are thought to have been built atop the remains of earlier structures.^[5] The winding, pedestrian-only pathways of the Old City provide a glimpse of life under the Islamic era (637–1110) that are increasingly rare in Lebanon. It is within this section of Saïda that the city’s Jewish Quarter is located.

By the end of the Egyptian occupation of greater Syria (1831–40), under which Saïda was at that time included, the growth of Beirut’s size and prominence led to the waning of Saïda’s status. As Aline Schlaepfer accounts, recordings of local Jewish notables who internally witnessed Saïda’s financial and cultural decline describe a “crushing” of the new capital Beirut, which was met with local “nostalgia and despair.”^[6] This posed existential problems for the Jewish community, which once functioned independently from the institutions that would, in the early twentieth century, coalesce around the new capital, Beirut. Following the establishment of France’s mandate in Lebanon in 1923, all local Jewish councils, who had independently overseen community affairs without much central oversight, became subservient to a central governing body in Beirut. This followed the model of the consistoire (consistory), a system established by Napoleon I in 1806 to centrally govern Jewish congregations throughout France and its imperial territories. In 1922, Beirut’s rabbi was made the chief rabbi for the whole of Lebanon, strengthening Saïda’s reliance on the capital for decision-making and further severing historical links to Jewish life in Palestine by granting Beirut-based religious and community leaders final say over the affairs of Saïda.

Despite the establishment of new imperial borders, social and economic connections between Lebanese Jews and the Jewish communities of British Mandate Palestine remained rich throughout the first half of the twentieth century.^[7] Practices like religious pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Tiberias, Safed, and Hebron, among other locales, remained strong and continued well into the French Mandate period. Despite the distinct separation of the British Mandate of Palestine from Lebanon and Syria following the Sykes–Picot Agreement, Lebanon’s economic success during this time owed much to its connections abroad. Jews in Palestine, too, found an eager market in Lebanon, which served as one of two major sales points for products produced by Jewish factories.^[8]

Though Jews in Saïda (as was the case with Jews across Lebanon) never faced state-sanctioned anti–Jewish measures, the fate of Saïda’s community demonstrates the historical intricacies lost when painting the case of the Jews of Lebanon with an overly broad and rose-colored brush. Much of the scant scholarship on Lebanese Jews has, rightfully, aimed to challenge the narrative that Jews of Arab countries all faced major government-sponsored persecution by showing a historic disinterest in the Zionist state-building project in favor of their social and financial commitment to Lebanon. Yet, as Yaël Mizrahi-Arnaud points out, these efforts to de-essentialize the fate of Jews in the Middle East can sometimes obscure the fact that creation of Israel, and indeed the very notion of a Jewish nation-state in the Eastern Mediterranean, emphatically did change the lived reality of many Jews in Lebanon.^[9] The Jewish community in Saïda had a complex relationship with the Yishuv (Jewish settlement in Palestine prior to 1948) and with the concept of political Zionism more generally; Saïda’s geographic proximity to what would later become Israel meant that, historically, the community heavily invested itself with Jewish life to the south. While the Saïdawi Jewish community did not show enthusiasm for Jewish efforts to settle in Palestine through mass relocation, it did demonstrate an appreciation for the idea of Zionism through material support to the Yishuv and a close association with Palestinian rabbis. According to Kirsten Schulze, Saïda’s Jewish community was the most heavily hit in Lebanon by the social implications of 1948. As a group, they declared their condemnation of the partition of Palestine, but “the Palestine question had brought to the surface the sectarian divisions to such an extent that the incidents against Lebanon’s Jews almost paled into insignificance by comparison.”^[10]

Despite the waning of Saïda’s importance, Beirut’s expansion encouraged the growth of the Jewish population in Lebanon, as it served as a haven for those fleeing anti–Jewish violence in Syria and Iraq in the wake of Israel’s establishment. Indeed, Lebanon is the only country in the Arab world where the Jewish community grew post–1948. Lebanon’s commitment to a laissez-faire economic system and its bustling (though volatile) post-World War II market attracted Middle Eastern Jewish participation; its vast ethno-religious diversity, where Christians held majority power in a confessionally based political system, gave Jews a sense of being one of many minorities. Lebanon’s Jewish population became doctors, bankers, merchants, and businesspeople in numbers disproportionate to the community’s size, and many embedded themselves in the upper echelons of Lebanon’s pre–Civil War economy.

Saïda’s proximity to historic Palestine, some seventy kilometers north, and its status as a majority Sunni city, made it an important refuge for Palestine refugees following the Nakba. Palestinians who, when forcibly displaced from their land, found themselves in Saïda settled predominantly in two refugee camps: Ein El-Hilweh and Mieh Mieh, located on the periphery of the city. Some, particularly those who did not register with the United Nations after arriving in the wake of the 1967 Naksa or others who found the conditions in the camps unlivable, made homes within Saïda’s Old City, where vacant properties were most available.

Despite the absence of a Jewish community in Saïda today, convoluted and discriminatory property laws, paradoxically, have helped to preserve the memory of Ḥarat al-Yahūd’s former residents. Ownership rights in post-Civil War Lebanon are notoriously difficult to maneuver, as family properties are often co-owned by numerous individuals dispersed across the diaspora. According to Lebanese property law, all must be physically present in Lebanon in order to assert or relinquish their shares, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deadlocked and abandoned properties across the country. What’s more, Palestinians are, by law, barred from purchasing property in Lebanon (in addition to holding over twenty designated white-collar professions or, in most cases, obtaining citizenship).[11] The entanglement of properties still owned by Lebanese Jews is further apparent when one examines the farmland on which Saïda’s aforementioned largest Palestinian refugee camps now sit. With the arrival of Palestinian refugees, some of this land was rented to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) to build camps and schools for the displaced, which today stretch far beyond their original allotted territory to accommodate Palestinians displaced from other areas during the Civil War. According to my interlocutors, a small number of Jewish families in the diaspora continue to collect an almost symbolic rent on the land leased to UNRWA, though in most cases this very small amount is paid on the original land rented to the organization and does not include its expanded domain. In a surprising turn of events, agricultural land owned by Jewish families became centers of Palestinian commando efforts: the Politis, a family from Saïda, owned the orchards in which Yasser Arafat sheltered when hunted by enemies.

 

Battle of the Placards

During the visit in which I’d meet Basma, when walking to the synagogue, our group passed a placard marking the entrance to Ḥarat al-Yahūd. Ahmed, our guide, told us that the sign was just one of the three to be recently hung above this archway: the Ḥarat al-Yahūd sign was first removed in 2008, when Sunni Sheikh Khader al-Kabsh replaced it with one reading Harat Ghaza (Gaza Quarter). In a speech attacking Israel, the sheikh, who is close to Hezbollah and later went on to fight with their forces in Syria in 2011, raised the sign as a symbol of solidarity with Palestinians and against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. Though the placard reading Ḥarat al-Yahūd was eventually returned, it was again removed in 2017 and replaced with one reading Ḥarat al-Quds (Jerusalem Quarter), this time by a group of young residents of the neighborhood protesting President Donald Trump’s announced plan to relocate the US embassy to Jerusalem and declare the city the capital of Israel. The sign was swapped, the youth told newspaper al-Akhbar, again as an act of solidarity, this time with calls for a general strike across Palestine. Though the placard in question may seem small, both in terms of materiality and in the context of an otherwise impoverished neighborhood, the events it sparked are demonstrative of how political claims are inscribed onto the built environment in a way that does not deny the neighborhood’s Jewish past, but complicates the ways in which its history is recalled in the present sociopolitical climate.

This symbolic renaming of Ḥarat al-Yahūd engages, from afar and in an inverse fashion, with the Israeli state’s practice of reproducing power in the built environment by replacing Palestinian place names with ones relevant to Israeli nationalism and culture. Processes of (re)naming, explains Julie Peteet, are “not only components of a repertoire of mechanisms of rule and a prominent part of historical transitions but are, methodologically speaking, themselves a means of tracking power.”^[12] Though they may at first appear as attempts to reconstitute lost geographies at the expense of other communal histories whose names lay claim to the same space, in Saïda, these actions can be understood as an argument claiming Palestinians’ right to exist and a reminder for all who access that space that its residents are suspended in an ongoing exile.

Despite the multiple changes in signage, the Jewish Quarter continues to be referred to as Ḥarat al-Yahūd by its residents today. It has been known as such for a “very long time,” an elderly shop owner on the outskirts of the neighborhood told me, although he could not quantify the age of its unofficial title, nor did he remember when the original sign in question was first raised. The owner of this small store, who is Lebanese and grew up in the Old City, remembered his Jewish friends from the neighborhood with fondness. He would sometimes undertake the role of Shabbat helper, he told me, leveraging his status as a non-Jew to help his Jewish neighbors with cooking or operating electrical appliances. During his childhood, there were many established Jewish businesses in the Old City that contributed to the economic and social life of the neighborhood. Jews in Sidon were well known for their role as money lenders and exchangers—as were many Jews across the lands of the former Ottoman Empire—occupying a role forbidden for Muslims by Islamic law. Other Jewish families in Saïda were goldsmiths, textile traders, and tailors, all classic Jewish professions across the region.

Conclusion                                                   

As a disenfranchised neighborhood where many Palestinian and Syrian refugees made their homes in the spaces abandoned by the city’s migrating Jews, Sidon’s Ḥarat al-Yahūd has become the unlikely setting in which residents stage public performances of their collective history and solidarity with Palestinians elsewhere. At the same time, the neighborhood’s residents recognize the continued importance of a Jewish connection to the city and serve as hosts to visiting Jews, whether they be diasporic Lebanese maintaining family properties or rabbis visiting in solidarity with Palestinians in Lebanon.

A consideration of who keeps the memories of Saïda’s Jews circulating on the ground also provides glimpses into seemingly disparate social factors that intersect with Jewish spaces in the present. Convoluted property laws like those in Saïda’s Old City have evolved around the mass landowner absenteeism that ballooned during the Civil War years and make the eviction of tenants a difficult task.[13] Non-Jews who maintain the spaces and stories once central to Jewish life in the Middle East and North Africa have been a source of fascination since the dispersal of Jews from these regions in the wake of Israel’s establishment in 1948. Today, the material remnants of what was once one of Lebanon’s largest centers of Jewish life acts as a space through which political power, regional histories of displacement, and daily life are contested and negotiated.     

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Molly Theodora Oringer is an anthropologist and postdoctoral fellow at Durham University (UK) whose research deals with material heritage, exile and absence, and collective memory in the Eastern Mediterranean. Her doctoral dissertation, culled from two years of ethnographic fieldwork, addresses the legacy of Lebanon’s Jewish community and their spaces post-Civil War (1975-90). Broadly, she is interested in questions of collective & nationalist narratives and memory, space/place, embodiment, and “otherness” in the body politic, particularly in the Middle East. Molly received her PhD from UCLA in Anthropology (2023); MA from New York University in Near Eastern Studies (2014); and my BA from Smith College in Religion (2012). 

Featured image (at top): A placard reading Ḥarat al-Yahūd announces one’s arrival to Sidon’s Jewish Quarter. Photo by Iraqi journalist and researcher Hussain Abdul-Hussain, 2023

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^[1] Though an official census has not been conducted since 1932, it is clear that the worldwide Lebanese diaspora (some 14 million people) vastly outnumbers the citizens residing in Lebanon (approximately 5.6 million).

^[2] Neturei Karta, founded in Jerusalem in 1938, are a small subset of the larger anti-Zionist, ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. Neturei Karta, like the much larger Satmar hasidic dynasty, is characterized by religious and social conservatism and notable anti-Zionist activity framed within a refusal to acknowledge Israel as legitimate, using religious rationale that returning to Jewish rule over Israel must only take place under divine auspices. For the members of the worldwide sects living in Israel, this involves a refusal to pay taxes, serve in the Israeli army, or visit the Western Wall. Unlike the Satmars, however, members of the Neturei Karta movement have been visible elements of the Palestine solidarity movement worldwide: the movement’s former leader, Moshe Hirsch, served as PLO president Yasser Arafat on Jewish affairs.

^[3] Navaro, Yael. 2012. The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity. Duke University Press.

^[4] Nahas, Charbel. 2007. Report: Stakeholder analysis and social assessment for the proposed cultural heritage and tourism development project‐Saida (Sidon).                       

^[5] Al-Harithy, Howayda and Giulia Guadagnoli. 2021. Report: Saida Urban Sustainable Development Strategy: Cultural and Natural Heritage.                   

^[6] Schlaepfer, Aline. 2021. “Sidon against Beirut: Space, Control, and the Limits of Sectarianism within the Jewish Community of Modern Lebanon.” International Journal of Middle East Studies. 53 (3): 424-38: 427.                      

^[7] Abou-Hodeib, Toufoul. 2015 “Sanctity Across the Border: Pilgrimage routes and state control in Mandate Lebanon and Palestine.” The Routledge Handbook of the History of the Middle East Mandates.

^[8] Schulze, Kristen. 2001. The Jews of Beirut: Between Coexistence and Conflict. University of Sussex Press: 36.

^[9] Mizrahi-Arnaud, Yael. 2024.”The Israelite Community Council of Sidon 1919-1948: between the Yishuv and Grand Liban.” Palestine/Israel Review. Forthcoming.                                                   

^[10] Schulze, Kirsten. 2009. “Point of Departure: the 1967 War and the Jews of Lebanon.” Israel Affairs. 15 (4): 335-54: 71.

[11] A small number of Palestinians have been granted Lebanese citizenship since 1948; this overwhelmingly follows the logic of sectarian and class anxieties, meaning that the Palestinians granted citizenship are largely Christian and not reliant on the state or INGOs.

^[12] Peteet, Julie. 2005. “Words as interventions: naming in the Palestine – Israel conflict.” Third World Quarterly. 26 (1). 153-72: 154.

[13] For more on the legal workings and applications of property law in Lebanon (as well as the implications for tenants with various degrees of informality), see Kanafani, Samar. 2016. “Made to Fall Apart: An Ethnography of Old Houses and Urban Renewal in Beirut.” PhD diss., University of Manchester.